Tag: Les Paul

Several months back, I came across this beauty in a collection that I had to have. It was Les Paul and Mary Ford’s ‘The Hit Makers’ from 1955. The original album came out in 1953 and was a 10″ record. This one is a 12″ re-release just two short years later and it added four more songs than the original.

Now it is pretty simple as to why I would want an album that is 63 years old. The album features Les Paul. This amazing guitarist and guitar builder is known worldwide and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to have some of his music in my collection. And it doesn’t disappoint. I could go into the history of Les Paul, but will save that for another post some time in the future.

Les Paul and Mary Ford met in the Summer of 1945 and married four years later. They recorded numerous albums together and ‘The Hit Makers!’ is a greatest hits collection of their music. The album is a mixture of instrumentals highlighting the great guitar playing of Les Paul and songs with Mary Ford singing away. Shortly after the release, the hits started to dry up a little as the start of something called “Rock & Roll” hit the radio airwaves.

Vinyl, Vinyl, Vinyl…I keep getting more and more and I get more addicted to wanting more and more. My wife shakes her head and just sighs at this point. I guess I could be drinking, smoking or doing drugs, but thankfully that is not the case. If I did those things, I would consume everything and I would just be throwing money away. With the vinyl purchases, I at least could sell them if I ran out of money, so it is an investment…yeah, let’s go with that!!

There is a friend at work that her husband has 2 big crates of vinyl in their closet and she wants them out of the house. So before they took them somewhere to sell them, she gave me first crack at going through them and letting me pick out the ones I want first. I gave her a fair price (more than any record store would give her, even more than they would in store credit).

The crates were very heavy and full of vinyl. My wife said I should take them upstairs in the Loft and sit with the family while I went through them. I declined as they were too dang heavy and I didn’t want to tackle the stairs with them. Instead, I stayed downstairs for a couple hours and slowly went through the collection.

The collection consisted of albums from the late 50’s all the way up to the late 80’s. Each crate was sort of themed. The one crate was from the 50’s-70’s and it was all her husband’s parents vinyl. It had stuff I had never heard of and a lot I had. There was Elvis, Liberace (I passed on those), Oak Ridge Boys, Alabama, the Kingston Trio and I could go on and on.